Of Ghosts and Saints
by wrldpossibility
Summary: Missing scene fic that spans from the end of S3 when Michael thinks Sara is dead, to 4.01 during their reunion.
1. Chapter 1

The first shot of tequila he's tasted in months slides down his throat easily, bleaching his brain like the cleansing of a palate, and he welcomes the accompanying warmth that saturates his body. With the second shot, he still desperately clings to blissful indifference, but by the third, the alcohol betrays him, and the images begin to return, filtering past his careful defenses as effortlessly as wisps of vapor. They slowly solidify, and by the fourth shot, she's whole again, as vibrant as she was in life, and he either cannot or will not banish her.

The first thing he sees are her hands. He physically reels with the force of the memory, and gestures to Lincoln for the bottle, gulping the tequila like a lifeline, but neither the first swallow nor the second change the fact that the feel of her palm is sliding over the inside of his wrist and her fingers are tangling with his. They're graceful and lithe, and his mind is a traitor he cannot expel, reminding him without a trace of sympathy of the sensual heat of her touch.

He squeezes his eyes shut, but the images are flashing against the back of his eyelids like a technicolor slide show, and his brain is washed in the pale mint shades of the infirmary, the white of her coat and the rich copper of her hair popping out against the muted tones like the glare of the sun slanting through her window. emThe /emwindow. He moans, his head in his hands, and he wants to cry out to her for mercy, but it's too late. The still frames of their shared experience assault him with a vengeance, and for once, she does not soothe, and she does not heal.

He feels her eyes on him from his perch on the exam table, calm hazel pools that work tirelessly to put together the puzzle that is his placement in Fox River. They widen with genuine terror as she grips his bloodied foot, then study him with deliberate calm as she dabs gently at the gash to his forehead. While she tends to him, her face is only inches from his own, and his world is suddenly narrowed along with his vision—for the span of time he is here, in this room, his only plan involves him and her and he is consumed with hope instead of anxious dread.

She comes to him in the yard, and his view of her face is spliced by the interlocking diamonds of the wire fence. He prefers the infirmary, where the lack of a visual reminder lets him believe there is no boundary. She's not to blame, but suddenly she's a vessel of his helplessness, and he treats her as such. He clings to whatever vestige of the upper hand remains to him, whatever pride he can muster, and won't let her help.

He drinks more and more, and Lincoln lets him, but he still feels the abject horror that sluices through his gut when he sees her grainy image on the guard monitor, when he reaches down for her and she stares up at him, so very afraid. The countenance of her fear is etched forever in his memory directly alongside her smile, and he hates what it says about him that the two images are slotted side-by-side in the depths of his recall.

He wants to make her smile. He makes her the flower, and it's not because he wants to win her over. It's not because he feels the force of magnetic desire whenever they share the same space, and sometimes when they don't. It's because it's her birthday, and he wants to see her happy. He wants to see the rounded apples above her cheekbones scrunch up cheerfully and the fine lines about her eyes crinkle in simple mirth. Because she's so often serious. She's so often all business, listening to the beat of his heart with a determination on her face that lets him know she will not admit to hearing more in those silent moments than the steady pulsing of his blood. That being privy to the cadence of his aortic artery does not give her access to the power of his suggestion or the nature of his thoughts.

Nor will she acknowledge her own. Not while they huddle together on the cold concrete floor of Ad Seg, his hand cradled in hers while she comforts with a soothing purr that positively vibrates against his body and resonates from the tips of his wasted fingers to the soles of his feet. Not when she accepts his gift of clay and mindless labor with an amused chuckle and something more that she quickly conceals under the guise of professional distance. He doesn't see the mirror of his longing in her eyes until the day it all falls apart. The day everything catches up to him, snowballing without warning and casting him so very far off his original course. He scrambles. He acts. He kisses her, fighting his way upstream against a current of misgiving.

Afterward, despite the blinding anger she uses as camouflage, he can see her feelings plainly, her thoughts as opaque as glass. Her face is flushed with a righteousness he knows he forced upon her, and regret, thick and black as night, covers his chest like a blanket that threatens to smother.

It remains upon him to this day, this day that he drinks and drinks and she will not go away. His memory marches forward, and she's lying there, unconscious and dying, and even though this image has only ever been pieced together from hearsay, he can practically hear the sound of the sirens that finally rescue her when he cannot. While he's not even _aware._ He folds paper cranes in his mind, sending them through the third party of the postal system when all he desires is to slip them into her palm himself, face to face. Skin to skin. He's forced to pound his head against a wall as he hears her voice for the first time since he's tasted freedom. There's no triumph. There's nothing to celebrate.

The next time he lays eyes on her, the sunlight is so bright she squints. She shields her eyes and her face and walks around from the side of her car to circle him cautiously. Her trust in him has been stripped away and he finds that it's he himself who is left bare. He bends double with the sheer weight of the pain and the hurt that she's dumped in his lap, but she'sem here,/em and that must count for something. And it _doe_ s count, until she's gone, without warning, and he's left with nothing more than a scribbled note and a haphazardly interlocking past.

But he tries again, and so does she, because this is something worth doing, and together, they board a train that will carry them toward a potential future. It sways and shakes underneath them, but fear and perhaps her own mortality nip at her heels and she becomes emboldened. She whispers her secrets and he kisses her again. She kisses him back, and smiles at him in a new way he didn't realize he'd been craving until she offers it and he is sated. Later, they joke because it's what they know how to do, and he clasps her hand in his because it's what he can give.

And there's more, but even in this inebriated state, what he knows of the rest remains tightly locked in the far recesses of his mind. Freighters and arrests and Panama are nothing more than a muddled and indiscernible carnage of nightmares that when he sleeps, bash upon the rocks of his dreams, over and over and over. This is where he must end it, because he will not mar his eulogy with the reality that is the rest of her story. He knows he's reeking of tequila, but only a dull sense of pointlessness remains on the back of his tongue. It leaves a bitter aftertaste that he cannot swallow. He had not known grief was physical. He had not foreseen that the depth of his pain would bring a pallor to his face that has nothing to do with his time in Sona. That his despair would turn to the color of chalk washed away by a driving, gray rain. And he knows he will martyr her. He will elevate her to sainthood, and it will most likely ruin the splintered fragments that masquerade as what's left of his life, but it's no more than she deserves and probably a lot less. His hands, clutching at his sides, are warm, tingling from what he's sure is the ghost of her touch, and he wonders how to mourn someone who won't leave. He drops his head, and he weeps.


	2. Chapter 2

_She's been pacing this room for nearly ten minutes._

She's standing at the window for the sole purpose of catching the earliest possible glimpse of him, but at the last moment, just as she hears the car pull up, she turns, training her eyes instead on the doorway. Suddenly, seeing him before he sees _her_ seems like cheating.

The car doors slam outside, the sharp sound on the quiet street exploding through her consciousness to further scatter her already rogue nerves from her head to her toes until her heart is hammering and her hands are shaking. She grips them together in front of her and keeps her eyes on the door.

He's the first one through it.

 _She can't breathe._ He was told she was dead, and as of only hours before, _she_ had thought it probable _he_ was as well, and now he's standing before her like some impossible marvel has been thrust in the face of all reason, and they scarcely know what to do with each other.

She moves first…slowly…because the fact is, he looks undeniably spooked. She can relate; a very real part of her is still afraid this is all just a mirage, that as soon as she steps out of the light and her pupils are forced to expand, receiving a fuller spectrum of stimulation, his form will waver then fade altogether.

He finally reaches for her, and she has time only to respond with the slightest sliver of a smile before his hand is grazing her cheek and then curling around the back of her head. And then? And then she's _there_ , flush against his solid torso, shaking as the sliver expands to a crack of unadulterated joy that breaks wide open to swallow her whole.

* * *

 _There had been no possible way to prepare for this._ On the car ride over, he had listened to Bruce recount all he knew of Sara's escape and subsequent flight from Panama (which hadn't been much), but for every word he absorbed, a dozen sprang forward in rebuttal as his mind insisted on feeding him a stubborn, continuous loop of denial. _This cannot be,_ he had thought fervently. _This cannot be, this cannot be, this cannot be._

She's standing by the window as he enters the room, and when she doesn't speak or move as the pale sunlight blurs the edges of her skin and hair and her white shirt, his first thought is that he should have listened to the voice of reason in his head. She's clearly an apparition…he will wake soon enough and he will hate himself all the more for the cruelty of this dream.

 _Stop this right now_ , he begs his eyes and his feet and his hands, because he's moving, and reaching, and _oh God,_ this is going to be so unbearably painful when he's proven right and she's not there to hold. She's gliding toward him, and then she's close enough to touch. He tells himself again to stop, but he risks it anyway and his palm cups the back of her head and it's solid and _oh_ her face is against his shoulder and her tears are wetting his neck and he bends into her, stroking her hair and trying not to faint as reality overruns his wildest dreams right before his eyes.

She's holding him so tightly he can do nothing but bury his head into her skin, but nothing-ever-has been so welcome. He can't speak, he can't look at her; in this ripped-raw state, all he can do is wrap his arms around her and revel in the pounding of her heart. That alone is so, so much more than he ever thought he'd get.

When she pulls back, he pushes the hair out of her face in a manner that's somehow greedy and reverent at the same time, but still, even with her an inch from him, the mere _sight_ of her face is not enough. He touches her instead, his palms braced against her jaw, one finger sliding across her mouth as though in tactile confirmation. _As though he's blind._ And maybe, at this exact moment, he is. His senses seem to keep overloading and crashing, only to overload all over again. She lets him feel his way along, her eyes steadily on him, her hesitant intake of breath warm against his fingertip.

It's too much, and not anywhere close to enough-her lips are parted, her eyes pleading, and he knows what he wants. He needs to taste her, to consume her; he dips his head and captures her mouth, kissing her.

* * *

Somewhere quite far away, she hears Bruce say something about unfinished business and being missed at work, and Lincoln is answering him, and then their voices are receding and the door is closing. She remains rooted in place, holding Michael to her, and a full minute must go by before she realizes how hard she's crying.

He is, too. Amid choking tears, he's alternating between kissing her face and mouth and the top of her head, his hands spanning from her hair to her jaw to her neck and back up again. She closes her eyes to his touch while maintaining a vice-like grip on his shoulders and back.

"How?" he gasps into her neck. His voice is rough and demanding and so full of love she sobs all the harder. _"How are you here?"_

She doesn't know. How could she possibly know the answer to that? She simply continues to cry, pulling him closer even though there's no way he could be nearer.

Having evidently given up on a satisfactory answer, his fingers graze her skin as he plies her jaw, opening her mouth to him as he kisses her again and again. They don't speak at all for some time; all she can hear is her own blood pounding against her temples and his answering thrum of pulse where her fingers rest at the base of his throat. At a pause for breath, she glances up at him, her lips curving into a hint of a smile. He returns it, and then the light behind her must catch his eye because he frowns and pulls her gently away from the window. There's another doorway to his right and he guides her though it blindly before halting at the sight of the bedroom she's been using for days.

Clearly only just becoming aware of where he's led them, he flicks a glance to her that's both hungry and apologetic, and in answer, she tips her head upward, desperate to feel him kiss her again. Desperate just to _feel_.

He's asking her something, pulling back, trying to elicit a response, but it's all too much…his words are lost in the screaming sensation of his hands roaming her body; it's as though he's trying to confirm everything at once, with his words, his mouth, his hands, and _God_ she feels it all. "Yes," she whispers into his mouth, taking a chance on the nature of his question. She hasn't computed what he asked, but it doesn't matter…it's the only answer she wants to give to _any_ question for a long, long time. She guides him backward, her hands fast on his hips, and he's saying something else, but by this point, she's given up any pretense of listening. Instead, she's kissing him anew, murmuring softly over the cadence of his voice, her soft sighs the gentlest ripple over the surface of his words. "Yes," she insists softly. _"Yes, yes, yes."_

At the bed, he stops her. "Are you alright? Are you sure you-"

"Michael." She cannot think about all the reasons she should not be ready for this. She cannot detail to him all the ways in which she is damaged. He's still looking at her like she's a ghost, and right now, at least for today, she needs to be whole for him. "I cannot get enough of you," she hears herself say, and while her bluntness surprises her, its exactly what he needed to hear. She watches his mouth fall open and his eyes darken, and she spurs him on, as if she's never needed anything so badly in her life. She _hasn't._ "You cannot give me too much," she adds, and to her relief, he takes her at her word. Her back hits the bed, and for a moment she thinks she'll panic, but then her mind takes pity on her, narrowing in sympathetic accord as it complies along with her body, processing nothing but Michael's touch.

It's fast and it's desperate and it's needy, and neither of them even bother to take off all their clothes. At its pinnacle, she finally allows her adrenaline and her nerves and her every carnal need free reign until sheer, thick desire is galloping under her skin, and _that's_ when she starts to speak, filling in a gap here and a blank there in short, gasping sentences into his ear, into his neck, into his own inked confessions across his chest. Because right here? Like this? She's no longer recounting the event of her escape to an audience, but almost to a part of herself.

* * *

He receives her words as she receives his body, and her outpouring of explanations fill him as he fills her in such a profound way that for minutes afterward, he can only look at her, speechless, his hand cradling her cheek, his mouth periodically dipping to close over her heated skin. She hasn't told him all of it, or really, even the half of it…only logistics, only enough to sketch the vaguest of timelines in his mind, but for now, it's enough.

He finally pulls himself away from her and the bed to find Lincoln and perhaps something for all of them to eat, and when he returns with a carton of Chinese take-out, the sight of her washes over his senses anew. The light has changed considerably in the room, and while there certainly wasn't anything ethereal about her as they shared this bed earlier, the spectral quality of their initial reunion has returned. At first he thinks it must simply be the combination of her muted shirt against her pale skin and his raw, battered emotions coloring his vision; after all, her hand, reaching for the food, is very much solid. A moment later, however, he realizes she's lit the candle set atop the shelf above the bed, and he knows then that it's this flame that's casting shadows-casting a doubt that can easily be snuffed-and nothing more.


End file.
